I’ve never tried to talk to any men on online dating sites because I’m not gay.
For anyone reading this thread who is less abrasive than, dontbesojumpy, from the bottom of my heart, I’m not saying you’re a socially inept loser if you use online dating. I tried it myself and had no idea of negative stigma attached to it. I don’t think it makes you a bad person.
All I’m saying is that in my personal experience, every single woman I communicated with came off like she was borderline retarded and had never communicated with another person before. I love the women I meet in my day to day life - that’s why I didn’t invest any more time in the idiots I was talking to online.
You seriously have to be kidding. I’ve never tried online dating so I have no axe to grind either way but damned near every single response you’ve given in this thread reeks of insults, digs, accusations, and sneering contempt. You seem exceedingly invested in proving a point about online dating as if you’re making money on each profile out there. If someone disagrees with you they are a failure and not a candidate for this or that or any other number of strange labels you want to stick them with.
You joke, young man, but I met a guy whose dating profile photos were so unlike him in person, that I wanted to turn around right away and go home. Just… unreal. I stuck with it because I thought maybe, although he’s a lying liar with a liarface, he might have been humorous enough to be worth sitting through dinner with considering our online interactions were pleasant. Nope!
Good thing I didn’t bet any actual money on this. Without knowing you, I’m guessing this was due to some combination of your profile being a not-so-great (it sounds cliche, but it really can be hard to try to sum yourself up in a profile), and your being outside of the typical OKC age range. I was on there as a 28 year old woman in a major city. Whole different ball of wax. The e-mails never end.
Please point out where I said online dating only works for people who don’t like interacting with others IRL. Please. What I said over and over is it appears that people who spend a lot of time online generally view online dating more favorably than those who don’t. I never said it only works for people who are online a lot, and I sure as shit didn’t say it only works for people who don’t like IRL interactions. I would assume people on online dating sites, you know, sites whose sole purpose is to get people to meet face to face, would enjoy in real life interactions.
^that. is where it started. saying something extremely insulting to all the women on dating sites then claiming i hate them more is a personal attack. and that was what i was met with after explaining men get less emails on dating sites than women. <which is all i said. i asked three times afterward for fuzzy to explain what on earth in my post was hostile or cited my opinion on women. after his personal insult, he refused to answer the questions. MoL has been insulting in literally every reply since the start of this thread, to everyone but MM and Fuzzy. so MoL, MM, and Fuzzy has basically set the tone of this thread. all i have done is gone with their lead.
scroll up just a few before this post–fuzzy is once again saying every girl he talked to online “was retarded.”
this is how he talks about women, then attacks me as hating them more than even he does. not cool. and not a good way to set the tone for a cordial discussion.
So you’re going with the “They started it!” defense. I see. It’s not you, it’s all of them. Gotcha.
PS: When you said “go back to my first post. i posted no opinion” I had to laugh. If you didn’t post an opinion in that entire rant then I guess I don’t know what an opinion is because hell, just the first two sentences are what most people would call an opinion. Like so:
For the record, every single one of your posts without exception has been bizarrely hostile, bordering on deranged. My original point was simply that I detected the blatant hostility and felt women might too. I’m now absolutely certain that everyone you interact with is painfully aware of the weird malice that comes with every thing you say. Basically, I nailed it on my very first response to your very first post and have been proven right every time you post another reply.
“Bordering on deranged,” ha ha. I’m laughing because your wording amuses me, not because what you say is untrue. I’ve actually just started skipping past his posts because he started out in this thread with a bizarre load of angered lunacy, and it hasn’t let up any since.
why did you ask “what gives” if you really didn’t want to know?
go back and look, page 2, at my first (and what i had meant to be only) post to the thread.
then look at their reactions. it was uneccessarily contrary and rude.
i didn’t start off being a dick for no reason. i started just giving my experience–as the op asked–without even giving much opinion. then i was attacked, then i saw that MM has attacked every positive experience as being ridiculously abnormal (same with MoL). it became clear this wasn’t about experiences as much as it was about confirming what the OP thought–which was wrongheadedly negative.
you asked “what gives.” that’s what gives. what else also gives is it took six pages and six reposts of the statistical success of online dating for MM to even acknowledge it (because it patently disputes his stance, so he just refused to discuss it), only to have him say the stats are made up–because they don’t jibe with his opinion.
maybe i have it all wrong–maybe IMHO means the dope stops and everyone is free to create their own facts. i was under the impression we were here to fight ignorance, even if it’s just our opinion–because some opinions are stalwartly in denial of the facts.
again. you don’t have to like it. you don’t have to do it. you can say it didn’t work for you and you hate it, etc. but the OP asked for experiences but so far has debated the veracity or legitimacy of every success story simply because it didn’t gel with his opinion. not to mention every thread he’s heavily participated in has gone exactly the same as this one…
probably that’s all a coincidence, tho.
eta:
you do realize that i posted three cites after that showing that it’s a statistical fact women get more attention from and more messages than men?
…you do realize there was a study explaining how women are in a better position?
it’s exactly my opinion. i posted three cites backing it up. one was a scientific experiment that concluded what i said.
Oy enough with the “Fighting Ignorance” crap. This is a messageboard. People are here to yak it up and blah blah about topics. The fighting ignorance stuff is an attempt at a humorous tagline and my cite that it isn’t true is most of this damned board. Plus, if you were here to fight ignorance you wouldn’t be so hostile and you’d use capitalization from time to time.
I think the problem with your “cites” is that you just pasted them without linking where you found them. Plus it seemed the cites you were giving were mostly from the online dating industry which would be like “This henhouse is safe from intruders” - The Fox™ Yes, yes I know there is a study explaining how women are in a better position but I’ll bet if you wanted to dig enough you could find a study saying the opposite. That’s the thing about these studies, the slant can depend on who is conducting the study, how many people are involved and what their particular situations are. Hell, they could have done that study with 10 guys who are as angry as you are. Also, the cites I’ve noticed (as mentioned above) usually say that the relationships begin “online” which can be online dating and it can also be messageboards, blogs, journals, Facebook, World of Warcraft and any other number of online activities.
I see that you’re backing away from the assertion that your first post did NOT contain opinions and you now say you gave your experience “without even giving much opinion” which is still pretty silly because it’s more or less ALL opinion and why not just say that because that’s what this forum is for, opinions!
When I asked what gives I meant what gives with YOU. Your answer is “THEY STARTED IT!” which is a child’s answer. I did look at their reactions. You think they were rude. I think they nailed your bitterness about your belief that for women online dating is great and how for men it isn’t. You don’t like their reactions to your opinion so you’ve spent pages on insults and attacks. So because you feel they were rude that means you have to double and triple down on the rude behavior?
Like I mentioned before, I have no axe to grind on the subject. I would assume that for some people online dating is great and for some it’s awful. Like most things in life it comes down to too many variables as to why it may work for some and not for others. You seem hellbent on proving something to people here far more than simply sharing your opinions and you seem to be pretty invested in doing it in the rudest way possible in the forum you’re in. If that’s how you like to handle things, have at it. Just don’t be surprised if people read it and think “WTF?” and then think maybe the bitterness in your first post is starting to make much more sense to them.
“you hate women!”
“dating sites are full of bad people!”
“all the women on them are socially inept losers”
“you’re dumb!”
“your stats are lies!”
“…hey WOW why on earth would you reply with HOSTILITY to this? you clearly have a problem…”
yes. clearly i’m the problem. how on earth would insults and petulance cause a conversation to go poorly?
and i’m not backing down from “my opinion.” i said women, by design, have it easier on dating sites, then LINKEDto a study explaining where i got that information.
i guess that’s “an opinion,” but it was based on a study.
so yes, totally.
that is also where my opinion on the success of online dating comes from–from statistical analysis.
btw i have no umbrage with the fact women have it easier (or however you want to say it. “are pursued more,” “have more options,” “get more messages,” etc).
i don’t understand how pointing that out (and again, citing a study indicating this seems to be an actual fact), is tantamount to “hating that fact.”
i have no opinion on it. it’s simply the continuation of social norms. men pursue women, and men congregate in greater density to attempt to procure women. it’s just how the universe seems to work.
trying to parlay simply pointing this out into “you hate women” is a gross misapprehension.
so, going back to really the only point i ever wanted to make before everything went off the shit waterfall:
if someone were to ask about the online dating experience: it will vary between a man and a women–and it will vary even more based on a slew of other factors. but right out of the gate, simply being a female puts you in a different position than being a male.
He had one post a while back where he described us 3 idiots who had the gall to post our negative experiences with online dating in a thread called “Online Dating Experiences”. I’m pretty sure he was talking about me, you and Modern Master but he didn’t mention us by name, just identified us by three unique insults.
Here it is:
[QUOTE=dontbesojumpy]
it’s really mostly just three people, and all three of them are kind of bad at social interaction via the net. one can’t voice an opinion on the subject without degrading everyone who participates, one can’t reply without being insufferable and hateful to anything they even remotely disagree with, and one is completely unable at understanding what people say or why they say it.
[/QUOTE]
It’s legitimately my favorite post anybody has ever made about me on the Straight Dope. I only wish I could tell which one is supposed to be me.
if someone were to ask about the online dating experience: it will vary between a man and a women–and it will vary even more based on a slew of other factors. but right out of the gate, simply being a female puts you in a different position than being a male.
[/QUOTE]
And it will vary if you are a fit 22 year old coed or a plump 50 year old divorcee with two kids.
When men compare dating experiences to women, they tend to compare their dating experiences to ladies five years younger and a few notches more attractive to themselves. Guys, if your were a 25 year old hardbody, you’d be getting messages up the wazoo as well.
Ooh! I really hope I’m the one who’s “insufferable and hateful.”
Hey jumpydude, just so you know, nobody cares about your stupid cites, okay? You keep harping on about those as if those are the crux of people’s issue with you. For one, I’ll just go ahead and accept your 1 in 6 recent marriages number (from the “independent resource center’s study” conducted by Match.com), but even so, I am extraordinarily impressed by that number. But secondly and more importantly, nobody thinks you’re the problem because you gave us a bunch of links; people think you’re the problem because you’re being a shrill, angry little man. You came out the gate crying about how women get more attention on OKC, sniping about catbird seats, and being generally butthurt that women get more online attention than men. Every post you’ve written in this thread has been inexplicably hostile. Calm the shit down.
The OP asked for our experiences and we gave them. Sorry if it offends you that some people aren’t keen on dating online, and are part of the 80%+ who find their partners offline. Also, just for kicks, your hard core shilling for internet dating is particularly hilarious in light of how upset you seem to be at its inherent bias in favor of women.